Nuclear Medicine: Should We Stop Using It?
When talking about the topic of nuclear medicine, people tend to bicker about whether we should keep using nuclear in our medication or not. Many people are very happy and satisfied with its pros, benefits, and advantages, probably from bias, but many are also against it, again, probably from bias. We should continue to keep using nuclear medicine because it has overall been effective in treating our diseases. Without the technology to treat people today, there would be a lot of casualties. It has been successful in discovering abnormal lesions, certain dysfunctional organs, if the heart pumping blood sufficiently, if the brain is receiving an appropriate supply of blood, if the brain cells are functioning
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It is the physician’s job to carefully figure out how much radiation can be of contact to their patient without any harm or damage done. Comparing the radiation risks to the potential benefits, it is definitely worth taking because the radiation risks are so low that it is irrelative. Besides, people get their radiation through mostly of natural background like the earth and then sun itself. They receive radiation exposure mostly from natural background than by medical procedure. There is no direct evidence that radiation from medical procedures themselves have lead to unwanted health issues, including cancer. Every exposure to radiation, even from the sun, carries some small risks of unwanted health risks, including cancer, no matter how small. An obvious disadvantage to the eye for chemotherapy is the hair loss. That itself has impacted a person’s self-esteem. Not everybody knows this but not all chemotherapeutic drugs or procedures cause this. It is believed and known by most that some of them cause it. The hair loss is not permanent. They start to grow once after the completion of the treatment. But the hair starts to grow in different textures and color after that. Nuclear medicine is chosen because people do not have to worry about irrelevant problems like …show more content…
Seidlin reported on the success of radioactive iodine (I-131) in treating a patient with advanced thyroid cancer. Later, the use of I-131 was expanded to applications such as thyroid gland imaging, hyperthyroidism treatment and quantification of thyroid function. By the 1950s, the clinical use of nuclear medicine had become widespread as researchers increased their understanding of detecting radioactivity and using radionuclides to monitor biochemical processes.” (Dr. Ananya Mandal, MD) With this information, we know that nuclear medicine is successful with multiple cases of diseases. Our technology today has improved on how treatments can be done. Nuclear medicine has improved from the time being. If treating a disease with nuclear medicine back then had been successful, imagine all of the success stories of everyone today who has had the chance of using nuclear medicine. Nowadays, the science and technology has developed so much that it is easy to cure any type of disease when proper guidance is given. If the technology is used properly, the side effects can be reversed. Today, we can easily figure out a way to reverse the effects of what we did to ourselves with all of the equipment, tools, and technology that people
People also benefit from atomic research in the medical field. Many people are aware of the wide use of radiation and radioisotopes in medicine. Nuclear medicine mostly uses radioisotopes which emit gamma rays from within the body. Estimates show that about one out of every three hospital patients benefits in some way from the use of nuclear medicine. Just think, every time you have an X-ray taken you are benefiting from nuclear research. Without X-rays, doctors would have a far greater time trying to set a broken bone if they even knew it was broken! Another common medical procedure that involves atomic research is the Cat-Scan. During this procedure the patient is injected with a radioactive isotope which shows the flow of blood through the
Nuclear medicine technology has advantages and disadvantages just as any other career. Using nuclear medicine technology could diagnose a lot of harmful diseases. Also, it is more effective treatment for most categories of cancerous diseases and conditions in some medical institutions. This type of medicine technology helps physicians perform their responsibility of patients’ therapy easily; moreover, when a serious disease developed in the patient’s body, the x-rays of this medicine technology could scan the most sensitive part of the patient’s body.
From surgery to radium exposure to such extremes as radiation therapy, as doctors’ knowledge of the varying types of cancer, and the expansion of medical research regarding cancer has changed, so has the preferred method of treatment. Doctors and researchers dedicated to studying cancer have led to a greater understanding of cancer development; consequently the development of treatments and cures that are more effective, less harmful, have fewer side effects, and in some cases serve to prevent the spread of cancer.
It is effective because it is more precise than normal radiation treatment and it can kill cancerous cells without damaging healthy normal cells. To overcome the economic advantages patients could apply to be one of the patients funded under the Proton Therapy Organisation; this allows them to receive funding to undergo Proton Therapy. To overcome the social disadvantages patients could use skin products to help with the skin problems that could occur as a side effect. The fatigue that comes from Proton Therapy doesn’t last for too long so patients could just take a day off to rest and recover. Overall I can conclude that Proton Therapy is a good treatment for a patient suffering from cancer and it is definitely beneficial with little side
Doctors had been using radiation to destroy cancerous cells since the unfolding of X-rays and radium in the 1890s, but both techniques had their own issues. X-ray machines were complicated to make use of, and radium implanted near tumors. In addition, X-rays weren’t strong enough to be entirely effective, and as for both of them, they were quite expensive.
Nuclear energy is used today for energy supply and about 15% of the world’s energy comes from nuclear power plants some forms of medicine such as nuclear medicine rely
The medical field also benefits from nuclear energy. Nuclear medicine is a field of medicine in which radioactive materials are used to diagnose and treat medical disorders
Nuclear medicine is a branch of medical science, which uses small amounts of radioactive materials in order to diagnose and treat diseases. These diseases include cancers, heart diseases, and other irregularities in the body. The nuclear medicine is injected into the blood stream in order to identify potential diseases. There are over forty million nuclear medicine procedures preformed each year through radiation, or the energy in form of waves or high speed particles. The use of nuclear medicine allows the treatment of diseases without surgery. This form of treatment causes only minimal damage to the tissues surrounding cancerous cells.
In the end, the pros surely outweigh the cons. One pro to using Nuclear Medicines is that it provides an accurate diagnosis due to the imaging that it provides Intel on a patient's condition without an extremely invasive surgery. This also leads to early disease detection and the ability to treat faster. Since Nuclear medicine can not only diagnosis but treat it's also used to cure with the use of treatments like radiation treatments and chemotherapy. Cons that people have considered is that the machines and the treatments are all very expensive and most people/ hospital cannot afford to use it on everyone. Also, the treatments are not alway guaranteed to cure the diseases and the scan do not always pick up the entire tumor or they don't detect this at all. All in all, nothing is perfect and life would certainly be worse without this cutting edge technology (Lombardo
Cancer is an incurable and unpredictable disease that, if left untreated, will likely result in death for the men, women, and children who must fight it. Sadly, approximately 36% of people will develop cancer during their lifetime, and of that percentage, fewer than 15% will survive, according to the National Cancer Institute. Along with surgery and chemotherapy, radiation is one of the few known methods for treating cancer, but it does not come without harmful side effects. While radiation therapy is currently a proven method for treating cancer, dangers to patients often outweigh its benefits, therefore a safer method for effectively treating and ultimately curing cancer.
There are many advantages and disadvantages to the use of radioactive elements in medicines. Some advantages include the fact that
Radiation therapy can be used anywhere in the body to treat any kind of cancer. Depending on what type of radiation therapy, it can have some side effects. The most common ones include fatigue, hair loss near the treated area, and skin darkening in the area exposed to a beam of radiation. ("Radiation Therapy for Cancer,” 1) There are also safety concerns that patients have when they are treated with radiation therapy. Many people that receive radiation therapy treatment, worry about exposing family and love ones to radiation, as well as the side effects. Radiation effects on the normal tissues are divided into acute and chronic effects (Schreiber). Acute effects occur during the course of therapy and during the post therapy period (approximately 2-3 weeks after the completion of a course of irradiation) (Schreiber).
Nuclear Medicine is the use of radioisotopes for diagnosis, treatment, and research. Radioactive chemical tracers emit gamma rays which provides diagnostic information about a person's anatomy and the functioning of specific organs. Radioisotopes are also utilizes in treatments of diseases such as cancer. It is estimated that approximately one in two people in Western countries are likely to experience the benefits of nuclear medicine in their lifetime.
While healthy babies are born every day, not everyone is so fortunate. In many cases, diagnostic radiology is required for patients during their childhood. Can having this radiation during the formative years lead to adverse effects later in life? The biggest concern from radiation is the risk of cancer. Cancer can occur at any dose from ionizing radiation because it is a stochastic effect, meaning that it is probabilistic. The probability of a stochastic effect, such as cancer, increases as the dose increases. While receiving this radiation may be necessary, it can cause some serious trouble later in life, such as breast cancer, leukemia, and thyroid cancer.
In 2007, it is predicted that almost 1.5 million people will be diagnosed with cancer in the United States (Pickle et al., 2007). More than half of these cancer patients will undergo the use of radiation as a means for treating cancer at some point during the course of their disease (Perez and Brady, 1998). Cancer, a disease caused by an uncontrollable growth of abnormal cells, affects millions of people around the world. Radiotherapy is one of the well known various methods used to treat cancer, where high powered rays are aimed directly at the tumor from the outside of the body as external radiation or an instrument is surgically placed inside the body producing a result of internal radiation. Radiation is delivered to the cancerous regions of the body to damage and destroy the cells in that area, terminating the rapid growth and division of the cells. Radiation therapy has been used by medicine as a treatment for cancer from the beginning of the twentieth century, with its earliest beginnings coming from the discovery of x-rays in 1895 by Wilhelm Röntgen. With the advancements in physics and computer programming, radiation had greatly evolved towards the end of the twentieth century and made the radiation treatment more effective. Radiation therapy is a curative treatment approach for cancer because it is successful in killing cancerous tumor cells and stop them from regenerating.